DESE BROOKLYN YOOTS

WHATSA MATTA WITH KIDS TODAY

Kids these days….I dunno, man.  I work with a bunch of gorgeous 22 to 26 year olds.  I serve kids their age at the bar, and you know what they are drinking?  In a wine bar? People in their twenties?   Water, non-alcoholic “mocktails” and tea.  

They aren’t even fucking, as far as I can tell, apart from the lesbians, who seem to have designated my wine bar as a first date joint.  It’s an odd new breed of lesbian, these gals - very old-school preppy:  Fair-Isle sweaters and lots of Eastern college hoodies.  They all seem like prep school Muffies with Yankee parents who just got out of Sarah Lawrence and celebrated by getting one or two surprisingly brazen tattoos. 

Tuesday nights are a veritable women’s bathhouse, ever since the building we’re in turned on the radiator heat and Brooklyn is unseasonably warm for mid-November.  The estrogen haze can fog up your glasses when there’s ten or twelve lesbian dates going on in the bar.  Once, while this was happening, the guy who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch with a Paul Bunyan beard came in.  I realized I hadn’t seen a man in hours.  

“Thank God you’re here,” I said, tossing him a menu.  “Our cycles were starting to sync up.”  He blushed.

Brooklyn black girls are spectacular, and seem to have themselves figured out, performatively — they have excellent braided hair formations and art nails, and wear cute outfits —  but a lot of the straight white girls shuffle around in ugly sweaters and orthopedic-looking walking shoes and have no apparent id.  They present no overt sexual cues.  They seem dull and lifeless. Their generation was larded with so much free pornography and they were taught so much feminism at the same time, some of the girls seem completely stultified into a state of such fearful chastity I presume they rarely, if ever, shave their legs.  Just forget about heavy petting.  They read hard books, dress like 14 year old boys, speak softly and rarely look you in the eyes.  I want to shake them all by the shoulders and make them take hallucinogens, but you really have to figure out these transgressions for yourself. 

A couple of natty young black guys came in the other night — a gay date, I figured, since one of them was wearing a fuzzy pink jacket and Charles Nelson Reilly glasses (see, that’s the kind of comment I can’t make with the young.  I’ve aged out of everyone’s frame of references, now.) They looked exciting and urban and I was eager to take their wine orders.  One ordered a glass of water and the other ordered a cup of herbal tea.  I got spluttery at them.  

“Why the hell aren’t you boys drinking?” I bellowed.   “Jesus Christ, when I was your age I was snorting heroin off of guard rails.” 

What I have found out about these kids, however, is that in different ways they are highly perverse.   We lowered the projection screen in the bar so we could watch election night (that miserable, unthinkable shitshow, which irrevocably proved that propaganda works beautifully and that the majority of Americans are dumber than soap) and before the coverage started, all the young girls were gathered around it watching compilation videos of Russian car accidents, recorded on the car’s dashcams, and laughing their asses off.  Crazy ultraviolent real-time car accidents. 

I can’t watch that shit!  I’m an empath!  It makes me cringe!  I feel terrible for everyone involved!  But they watch it with the same emotional disconnect they must feel playing “Grand Theft Auto” and throwing hookers off bridges — for them, it’s entertainment. 

Real Roman Colosseum shit. Drone warfare is just a click away.

(And this helped me understand how the election happened.)  

There’s also a hell of a lot of young they/thems running around Brooklyn— and I wonder in my heart of hearts if this isn’t also somehow a reaction to growing up with ubiquitous hardcore porn.  I don’t blame anyone who wants to drop out of the male gaze race, and all the Botox, stretch lace and implants it implies. 

So, what’s normal for these kids?  Hanging around talking about being poly.  I think of polyamory as the new I-Phone App that enables men to date 4 women at a time, none of them seriously.  

They’re in it to win it though, these poly kids.  

I eavesdrop on their conversations sometimes.  Polyamory has 

so many rules!  So many turgid, joyless conversations and endless micro-negotiations! 

“Jesus.  To be poly would be like learning to use a fucking sewing machine,”  I whispered to one of our comely barmaids.

Then I couldn’t help myself. 

“You know what’s really awesome, ladies?” I asked, injecting myself into the poly conversation.  “Monagamy,” I said with a smile, because it happens to be working for me at the moment.  The girls all froze like I’d just poured eels down their Y-fronts.  They didn’t know how to feel.  They were offended, but couldn’t quite pin it on me.  I realized that I am old now and starting to do the equivalent of when old people make racist comments, except I offend the sexually complicated. I need to make sure I don’t turn into a Sex Karen.

I am going to my hairdresser today for a consultation about hair extensions.  The time for Lord of the Rings elf hair is now.  After 9/11, I bought all the National Lampoon magazines I could find on eBay, because for all I knew, it was the end of the world, and that’s how I wanted to go out: reading Nat Lamp. Now I KNOW it’s the end of the world, and I want my fucking elf hair NOW.  It’s a primal need. 

There is one thing that is for sure, and that is that I do not envy the young at this particular point in our political history.

In the event of a civil war, there will be an endless conflict, like the Israelis and the Palestinians.  The Hatfields and McCoys.  Intergenerational hatred.  Some of us with souls will always remember that there was once such a thing as ontological truth, and these red fucks betrayed it constantly in the service of greed, hate, racketeering and racism. 

Never fucking surrender, I want to tell these meek youths of today.   Listen to some punk rock.  Throw a TV out the window.  Get fucked up.   Make sure you have some kind of life outside of the mainstream Matrix before it’s totally impossible.  Mushrooms, children.  Be sure to eat all your mushrooms. 

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Marvelette,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2023

Hey!  Follow the Instagram App I do for my bar. 

It’s @wordofmouthBrooklyn.